6th Munich-Sydney-Tilburg conference onMODELS AND DECISIONS

Mathematical and computational models are central to decision-making in a wide-variety of contexts in science and policy: They are used to assess the risk of large investments, to evaluate the merits of alternative medical therapies, and are often key in decisions on international policies – climate policy being one of the most prominent examples. In many of these cases, they assist in drawing conclusions from complex assumptions. While the value of these models is undisputed, their increasingly widespread use raises several philosophical questions: What makes scientific models so important? In which way do they describe, or even explain their target systems? What makes models so reliable? And: What are the imports, and the limits, of using models in policy making? This conference will bring together philosophers of science, economists, statisticians and policy makers to discuss these and related questions. Experts from a variety of field will exchange first-hand experience and insights in order to identify the assets and the pitfalls of model-based decision-making. The conference will also address and evaluate the increasing role of model-based research in scientific practice, both from a practical and from a philosophical point of view.

We invite submissions of extended abstracts of 1000 words by 15 December 2012. Decisions will be made by 15 January 2013.

PUBLICATION: We plan to publish selected papers presented at the conference in a special issue of a journal or with a major a book publisher (subject to the usual refereeing process). The submission deadline is 1 July 2013. The maximal paper length is 7000 words.

GRADUATE FELLOWSHIPS: A few travel bursaries for graduate students are available (up to 500 Euro). See website for details.

The two postdoctoral researchers will work
full-time on the project for three years, doing individual and collaborative
research and helping organise project events. This post represents an excellent
opportunity for someone early in their academic career to be an important part
of a high-profile project and to gain experience of cutting-edge research,
while also developing a substantial publication profile.

Friday, 26 October 2012

(I posted this originally at NewAPPS, which is where I usually post my thoughts on philosophical methodology, but on this topic in particular I look forward to the opinions of readers of M-Phi as well.)

Between today and
tomorrow, the workshop ‘Groundedness in Semantics and Beyond’ is taking place
at MCMP in Munich, co-organized with the the ERC project Plurals,
Predicates, and Paradox led by Øystein
Linnebo. The workshop’s program seems excellent across the board, but the
opening talk is what really caught my attention: Patrick Suppes on ‘A
neuroscience perspective on the foundations of mathematics’. The abstract:

I mainly ask and partially answer three questions. First,
what is a number? Second, how does the brain process numbers? Third, what are
the brain processes by which mathematicians discover new theorems about
numbers? Of course, these three questions generalize immediately to mathematical
objects and processes of a more general nature. Typical examples are abstract
groups, high dimensional spaces or probability structures. But my emphasis is
not on these mathematical structures as such, but how we think about them. For the grounding of mathematics, I argue
that understanding how we think about mathematics and discover new results is
as important as foundations of mathematics in the traditional sense.

I cannot stress enough how fantastic it is that someone
like Suppes, who has done so much groundbreaking foundational work in the
traditional sense, now turns his attention to this more ‘human’ aspect of
mathematics. (And also how amazing it is that he is over 90 years old and
rocking!)

To be sure, focus on mathematical practices as an
alternative approach to the philosophy of mathematics has been gaining popularity
in recent years (see for example P. Mancosu’s Philosophy of Mathematical
Practice), but emphasis on the philosophical importance specifically of empirical
findings from the psychology and cognitive science of mathematics is still
quite rare (exceptions: Marcus Giaquinto, Helen de Cruz, Dirk Schlimm, among
others). And yet, work on the cognitive science of numbers such as e.g. S. Dehaene’s
seems to lend itself quite easily to philosophical theorizing. The point is not
that this approach should supplant more traditional approaches, but rather that
a number of philosophical questions cannot be adequately addressed unless we
adopt such an integrative methodology (or so I have claimed several times at
NewAPPS, here for example).

For those of us who couldn’t be in Munich this morning
(myself included), we can now look forward to the video podcast of the talk
which is bound to become available at the MCMP iTunes channel in due course.
But for now, here is a picture of Suppes in action, courtesy of Olivier Roy.

Tuesday, 23 October 2012

It's been much too long since I last posted here at M-Phi! (I've been unusually busy with all kinds of things.) What follows here is still not a proper post: it is in fact a review of Stephen Read's edition and translation of Bradwardine's treatise on insolubles, which I just wrote for Speculum. But I figured that it may be of general interest -- after all, any M-Phi'er worthy of the title should be familiar with Bradwardine on the Liar.
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Thomas Bradwardine (first half of the 14th
century) is well known for his decisive contributions to physics (he was one of
the founders of the Merton School of Calculators) as well as for his
theological work, in particular his defense of Augustinianism in De Causa Dei. He also led an eventful
life, accompanying Edward III to the battlefield as his confessor, and dying of
the Black Death in 1349 one week after a hasty return to England to take up his
new appointment as the Archbishop of Canterbury.

What is thus far less well known about
Bradwardine is that, prior to these adventures, in the early to mid-1320s, he
worked extensively on logical topics. In this period, he composed his logical tour de force: his treatise on
insolubles. Insolubles were logical puzzles to which Latin medieval authors
devoted a considerable amount of attention (Spade & Read 2009). What is
special about insolubles is that they often involve some kind of self-reference
or self-reflection. The paradigmatic insoluble is what is now known (not a term
used by the medieval authors themselves) as the liar paradox: ‘This sentence is not true’. If it is true, then it
is not true; but if it is not true, then what it says about itself is correct,
namely that it is not true, and thus it is true after all. Hence, we are forced
to conclude that the sentence is both true and false, which violates the principle
of bivalence. It is interesting to note that, in the hands of Tarski, Kripke
and other towering figures, the liar and similar paradoxes re-emerged in the 20th
century as one of the main topics within philosophy of logic and philosophical
logic, and remain to this day a much discussed topic.

Bradwardine’s De insolubilibus has been recently given its first critical
edition, accompanied by an English translation and an extensive introduction,
by Stephen Read. One cannot overestimate the importance of the publication of
this volume for the study of the history of logic as a whole; prior to this
edition, Bradwardine’s text was available in print only in an unreliable edition
by M.L. Roure in 1970. Moreover, Bradwardine’s treatise is arguably the most
important medieval treatise on the topic. So far, the general philosophical
audience is mostly familiar with John Buridan's approach to insolubles;
the relevant passages from chapter 8 of his Sophismata
have received multiple English translations and been extensively discussed. But
Buridan's text pales in comparison to Bradwardine’s treatise; Bradwardine not only
offers a detailed account and refutation of previously held positions (chapters
2 to 5), but he also presents his own novel, revolutionary solution (chapters 6
to 12).

The backbone of Bradwardine’s solution is
the idea that sentences typically signify several things, not only their most
apparent signification. In particular, they signify everything they entail.
Moreover, Bradwardine postulates that, for a sentence to be true, everything it signifies must be the
case; in other words, he associates the notion of truth to universal quantification over what a sentence says. Accordingly, a
sentence is false if at least one of the things it signifies is not the case (existential quantification). He then goes on to prove that insoluble sentences
say of themselves not only that they are not true, but also that they are true.
Hence, such sentences say two contradictory things, which can never both
obtain; so at least one of them is not the case, and thus such sentences are simply
false.

Unlike Buridan, who merely postulates
without further argumentation that every sentence implies that it is true,
Bradwardine makes no such assumption, and instead proves (through a rather
subtle argument, reconstructed in section 5 of Read’s introduction) that
specific sentences, namely insolubles, say of themselves that they are true. In
this sense, Bradwardine’s analysis can rightly be said to be more sophisticated
and compelling than Buridan’s.

Bradwardine’s solution to insolubles is not
only of interest to the historian of logic, and indeed Read and others have
written extensively on its significance for contemporary debates on paradoxes
of self-reference. In fact, a whole volume was published on the philosophical
significance of Bradwardine’s analysis (Rahman et al. 2008). According to Read,
the Bradwardinian framework allows for the treatment of a wide range of
paradoxes as well as for the development of a conceptually motivated,
paradox-resistant theory of truth in terms of quantification over what a
sentence says. Alas, the latter project was not to succeed, for the following
reason. As pointed out by Read himself in his critique of Buridan (Read 2002),
a theory that says that every sentence signifies (implies) its own truth cannot
offer an effective definition of truth, as every sentence becomes what is known
as a truth-teller: one necessary condition for its truth is that be true (as it
is one of the things it says), ensuing a fatal form of circularity. Now, as it
turns out, while Bradwardine does not postulate that every sentence signifies
its own truth, this does follow as a corollary from his general principles
(Dutilh Novaes 2011). Thus, Read’s own criticism against Buridan’s approach
applies to Bradwardine as well. This does not affect the Bradwardine/Read
solutions to the paradoxes because all of them (paradoxes) come out as false, but ultimately
Bradwardine cannot deliver a satisfactory theory of truth.

However, this observation should in no way
be construed as a criticism of Read’s work in general and of his edition and
translation of Bradwardine’s treatise in particular. It is indeed the job of a
reviewer to spot shortcomings in a volume, even if only minor ones, but this
reviewer failed miserably at this endeavor. Read’s volume is an absolutely
exemplary combination of historical and textual rigor (for the edition and translation
of the text) with philosophical insight into the conceptual intricacies of the
material; it is both accessible and sophisticated. As such, it is to be
emphatically recommended to anyone interested in the history of logic as well
as in modern discussions on paradoxes and self-reference.

Thursday, 11 October 2012

The MCMP recently announced the publication of the 200th recording in the MCMP video channel on iTunes U. Today we are happy to announce the publication of the “Round Table on Coherence Media Package”! Many attended the working session with Branden Fitelson and Richard Pettigrew in July, the second edition of the MCMP Round Table series. Many have been asking about the video recordings we made on this occasion. The whole package is online now – videos, slides, and additional material are available on the MCMP website at

Saturday, 6 October 2012

My colleagues Sylvia Wenmackers and Jeanne Peijnenburg are editing a special issue on Infinite Regress for Synthese, and are looking in particular for formal/mathematical treatments of the topic - certainly something of interest to M-Phiers of all stripes! See the CFP below.

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We are happy to announce this first call for papers on "Infinite regress", a special issue to appear in Synthese, edited by Jeanne Peijnenburg and Sylvia Wenmackers (University of Groningen).

The theme of the special issue is infinite regresses in various contexts, including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, etc. The topic of infinite regress is an old one in philosophy, but recent developments in theoretical philosophy suggest that the time is right for a new approach to this ancient problem.

We invite novel contributions in which probabilistic models, logic, or other tools from contemporary formal philosophy are brought to bear on the problem of infinite regress. We are also interested in analyses of the relationship between aspects of traditional epistemology or metaphysics on the one hand and these technical results on the other hand.

Deadline for submission: July 1st, 2013.

For more information, please see the website: http://www.sylviawenmackers.be/CFP/InfiniteRegress.html

Thursday, 4 October 2012

More than 30 videos have been published recently on iTunes U by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. These are talks from the 9th edition of the Formal Epistemology Workshop (FEW2012), held in Munich last spring. You can also retrieve the videos very effectively from the MCMP fb page (scroll down a bit and check the items released around mid-September). It'll be like you were there ;-)

(Thanks Roland Poellinger and the LMUcast Team for this amazing work.)